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Venezuela: What is Chavismo?

A massive rally was held in Caracas in defence of the Bolivarian
Revolution on January 23, 2013. Known as the "Day of
Democracy" in Venezuela, it marks the day in 1958 when the
dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown by a civilian-military
movement.

By Elias Jaua, former vice-president of Venezuela, translation by Rachael Boothroyd

[Jaua was appointed Venezuela's foreign minister soon after this article was written.]

January 4, 2013 -- Aporrea viaVenezuelanalysis.com --The Bolivarian civic-military organisation that began to be constructed as a political force under the leadership of Comandante Hugo
Chavez is rooted principally in the rebellions of the people and the
military in 1989 and 1992 respectively. However, the structure of the
Bolivarian Movement 200 (MBR200) as a presence in the streets began to
take place at the beginning of 1994, when Hugo Chavez was released from
prison and began a social and political pilgrimage throughout the
country.

Between 1994 and 1998 Comandante Chavez managed to bring
students, professionals, small and medium-sized business owners,
peasants, farmers, fishers, miners, Indigenous peoples, workers, women,
young people, the military, local activist leaders, and almost the
entirety of Venezuela’s left leadership into the project of rescuing
Simone Bolivar’s thought and holding a constituent assembly to re-found the
state and recover national and popular sovereignty, with the goal of
transforming the structures responsible for the social exclusion of the
majority of the people. He even opportunistically managed to gain the
support of important sectors of the bourgeoisie for the Bolivarian
political insurgency.

That’s how Comandante Chavez was elected a president on
December 6, 1998, and through this, activated a constituent process that
would lead to the election of a national constituent assembly and the
subsequent approval by the people of the Bolivarian Republic of
Venezuela’s constitution; a totally unprecedented event in our country’s
history.

Within the context of the this process, the president of the
republic, Hugo Chavez, began to take innovative steps, employing the
armed forces en masse for activities aimed at social protection and
national development, taking to the streets to meet the poorest and most
excluded sectors of society, challenging the bosses of the large
private media chains and giving a revolutionary function to the public
media, developing a courageous form of international politics and
establishing links with Cuba, China, Iraq and Iran, as well as starting the recovery process for the geopolitical weight that is the OPEC --
among other challenges to the established powers.

All these measures
began to shape a new political practice that is sustained through the
exercise of full national sovereignty and the independence of the
republic’s government from any influence from external or internal
powers; the recognition of the political protagonism of the people and
social inclusion as a human right, as well as the demystification of
current powers.

In 2000, following a process that re-established government powers,
as required by the new constitution passed in 1999, President Hugo
Chavez requested that the new national assembly, which was now a
constitutional body, begin to prepare to legislate social
and economic matters.

This process aimed at creating and approving laws by the president,
aimed at fulfilling the constitutional mandate to transform our
institutions, economic regime and the role of the state in the economy,
was added to a growing tension in the international arena with the
defence of our sovereignty and
world peace from threats by the United States, Colombia and Spain, which would lead to a confrontation with the dominant
elites who would unleash the events of 2002.

'Chavista'

I give you this
historical examination simply to contextualise the moment in which the
term “Chavista” appears and to identify the peoples’ Bolivarian current that emerged at the end of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s.
Even in 2001, the political forces led by Commander Chavez identified
ourselves as “men and women of Bolivar”, very few people identified
themselves as Chavista.

The moment that the dominant elites
decided to put an end to this revolutionary experiment, they used all
their arsenal of social hatred against the poor people who followed Comandante Chavez.
That’s how they added the new epitaph, “Chavista” in the singular and
“Chavista hordes” or “circles of terror” in the plural, to the long and
historic list of adjectives used to criminalise the people (low life,
hordes, bandits, black trash, thugs etc.).

In reality it was an attempt to strip us of our identity as
Bolivarian, it was the oligarchy’s final effort to preserve the term
Bolivar within the rusty archives of history academies. However, not
only could they not steal from us the essence of the name “sons of
Bolivar”, but we took on the name Chavista as well, and we dignifiedly
gave it a new meaning.

I remember a march when I saw a sign declaring “I’m
Chavista, so what?” for the first time, etched angrily on a piece of
cardboard by a woman from the working class. From then on we were
Chavistas, which at the beginning just meant that we were followers and
defenders of Hugo Chavez. As Bolivarians and Chavistas we won battles
against the coup, the fascist strikes in 2002, the guarimbas* of 2003
and saw our president ratified in 2004.

After consolidating the peoples’ victories of 2002, 2003 and 2004, we
once again ratified our identity as Chavista. I remember that in that
period the commander began to question the term, because he believed
that it gave way to a personalistic tendency that went against
revolutionary principles, but he later realised that being Chavista was
something that transcended his surname.

Being Chavista means feeling a connection of love toward a political
leader who hasn’t betrayed us, it means recognising ourselves as a
people who are the descendents of a historical hero who belongs to us
and who has become the present and the future; it is knowing that nobody
is worth more than anybody else, knowing that we all have rights to all
rights, feeling a profound love in our souls for our homeland and
feeling deeply proud of being Venezuelan men and women, proud of being
Latin American.

Being Chavista is knowing that power belongs to us a people and not
to the rich, it is feeling respected in our cultural and social
diversity. Being Chavista is being conscious of the fact that our
national income is for everybody and holding human solidarity up as a
supreme value. Being Chavista is to feel part of a strong ethical belief
in life, for the liberation of the people, for the union of South
America, for the greatness and the beauty of what they didn’t teach us
about our father, Simon Bolivar. Being Chavista is to be irreverent in
the face of domination. Being Chavista is both thinking and acting from a
leftist standpoint.

That is what Bolivarianism is and Chavismo was born from it. It was
profoundly Christian and then it became socialist, because there is no
other way to genuinely express the highest level of human values.

Today Chavismo is one of the largest leftist political and social
forces with one of the greatest impacts on the world, and it has become a
reference point for the “poor of this Earth” (a reference to Cuban
revolutionary, José Martí). Today Chavismo is Hugo Chavez and Hugo
Chavez is Chavismo.

So great is the impact of this new
political culture that the right wing in Venezuela and in other countries
have tried to take control, albeit unsuccessfully, of Chavismo’s codes
and values. They do not understand that there is no Chavismo without the
thought and passion that Chavez has for the people, that Chavismo
doesn’t exist without a free people, that there is no Chavismo without a
preferential option for the poor, that there is no Chavismo without
true socialism.

For this and many other reasons, we are proud
to be Chavistas, socialists and Bolivarian. WE ARE CHAVISMO, A JOYFUL
AND REVOLUTIONARY FORCE FOR LIBERATION.

Happy new year for
2013, a year of great challenges for Venezuela, the 200th anniversary
of the beginning of Venezuela’s second republic, proclaimed by our
father Simon Bolivar. We will live and we will win!

*Guarimba is a word used by the Venezuelan opposition to describe its tactics used to try to bring down the government, including violent
mobilisations in the streets, shooting firearms and trying to provoke a
repressive reaction from the government.